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Seat belts recommended for country NSW buses

MARK COLVIN: A school bus safety advisory committee has told the New South Wales Government that buses in rural and regional areas should have seat belts installed. It's among 35 recommendations in the committee's report.

Three New South Wales children have died in bus crashes over the last decade, 624 others have been injured. The most recent, nine-year-old Harry Dunn, was ejected from a window of a school bus that crashed in Singleton last month.

The committee was set up in April last year specifically to look at school bus safety in more remote areas of the state. But some people are saying it doesn't go far enough.

Elyse Denman reports.

ELYSE DENMAN: Seat belts have been mandatory in cars since 1972, but New South Wales and Victoria have still not addressed safety issues on public school buses. A school bus safety advisory committee has been looking at the dangers that school children face every day when travelling to and from school.

Its chairwoman Carolyn Walsh says the committee was tasked to look specifically at rural and regional areas.

CAROLYN WALSH: You deal with very different operating environments at high speed, sharing the road with other heavy vehicles. And you're also dealing with often some more difficult geographic and climactic areas.

So the hazards associated with road travel in regional and rural areas are quite different to those associated with metro and outer metro.

ELYSE DENMAN: I suppose some parents in metropolitan areas would be wondering why those children would be seen as somehow more important than their own?

CAROLYN WALSH: Look I certainly wouldn't view it in that way. All kids are very important in terms of their safety.

But to give you an example, what our committee found when we looked at the statistics is the casualty rate, that is injuries to kids, the rate of those is twice as high in the rural and regional areas of New South Wales. So there's actually evidence to suggest that travelling on a bus in those area is more hazardous than in the city areas, and that justifies taking a good look at how that number can be brought down.

ELYSE DENMAN: Today the committee handed over its report to the Government for its consideration. Amongst 35 recommendations are four key reforms.

It calls for buses in rural and regional areas to be fitted with seat belts over a period of 10 years and a ban on standing in buses where speeds often reach 80 kilometres or more. The Government is also being urged to prioritise infrastructure spending on school bus routes and improve safety awareness campaigns for motorists.

Senior surgeon Danny Cass has treated victims from three bus accidents at Westmead Children's Hospital and says the reforms should be statewide.

DANNY CASS: It is an oversight not to include the metropolitan area. The children are at the same risk when they're travelling at speed on school buses on a regional road, motorway or a speedy local road.

ELYSE DENMAN: But Carolyn Walsh says it's not as simple as it seems.

CAROLYN WALSH: That sounds like a very simple thing to do, but the fact of the matter is that there's 3,600 odd buses operating in this area around the country. To either replace or to retrofit those buses is actually quite a significant undertaking.

So it really is a scale thing to be able to do this in terms of cost to government over a period of time. And the cost to the industry, all the things that the industry has to do to actually be able to take it up.

ELYSE DENMAN: Professor Cass thinks it's too little too late, that the opportunity to act was missed after the Kempsey bus crash 20 years ago. He says considering costs and the impact on the transport industry is wasting valuable time.

DANNY CASS: From the opinion as a paediatric surgeon treating children is that one death's one too many. And this discussion we have about the cost of a seatbelt versus how many children could be severely injured and die, and put a dollar feature on it, is a flawed argument.

ELYSE DENMAN: Just last month, eight-year-old Harry Dunn died when the bus he was travelling on in Singleton, collided with a semitrailer. But because it's a metropolitan area, parents will continue to send their children off to school without seatbelts.